Most business and technical documents today are written, edited and stored electronically. Organizations commonly deal with vast numbers of documents, which often go through multiple versions. A document typically begins its life as a draft, which is updated and changed multiple times until a final, “official” version is created (which may be further changed subsequently). Identifying and using the proper version of the document is often crucial. Sending the wrong version of a document to an outside party, for example, can have serious negative consequences.
Keeping track of document versions becomes even more difficult when documents are shared among different members of an organization. This sort of situation is common, particularly since many documents are produced by collaborative effort of a number of people. As a result, there may be as many as hundreds of copies of a given document in different directories and accounts. These copies may be distributed, for example, among organizational file systems, document management systems and mail servers. Some of these copies may be identical (or nearly identical), while others may contain substantial changes or may only partially overlap. Different versions of the same document may be saved in different file formats and under different file names. Furthermore, documents are frequently reused, with one document serving as a template or starting point for other, similar documents.
Many document management systems and word processors include version tracking utilities or features. Most such utilities are useful, however, only when the all the versions are created and maintained using the same document management system or word processor, with explicit links among the versions.